Marketing of products and services is conducted over several different types of channels, including mail, electronic mail, radio, television and telemarketing. Different types of channels are suitable for different types of marketing campaigns. For example, mail and electronic mail is generally used for direct mailing campaigns. Promotions and advertising are conducted on television, radio, print media as well as the Internet. In particular, web sites often carry paid advertising.
While marketing on the Internet would appear to offer the greatest potential for technical advances, the present techniques employed to evaluate marketing on the Internet are no faster than ordinary techniques employed in evaluating advertising/marketing in conventional media (e.g., television and radio). Generally, the marketing manager (or, on the Internet, the site manager) employs an independent marketing company to run a marketing campaign and then collect the results and provide an evaluation. The turn-around time for such an evaluation often can be several months following the completion of the marketing or advertising campaign. The marketing company uses any one of several well-known databases characterizing a large population of purchasers to construct the marketing campaign. The results following the marketing campaign completion represent the returns on a subset of that database, but are often too ponderous for any marketing manager to fully digest and infer reasonable decisions for a follow-on campaign, with the exception of obvious user trends that can be derived through traditional data reporting and by a knowledge worker. The long time delay in returning results and the difficulty of using the complex return data to make further marketing decisions has always prevented marketing from advancing from its present state of uncertainty and slow adaptation. This has been a fundamental limitation in advertising and promotion on all communication channels, including radio, television, print media, mail and the Internet. In addition, most criteria for selection of targets for marketing campaigns or individualized promotions are based on traditional selection methods and do not utilize the wealth of data available in detailed transactions (purchases) and web site browsing behavior of customers. This extremely informative source of data is typically ignored, or aggregated to much higher levels, losing much of the valuable details.
More problematic is the impossibility of reliably inferring optimum marketing decisions from the results obtained from marketing or advertising campaigns. Such decisions are typically the result of educated guessing based upon the instincts and experience of the marketing manager and are only partially affected by the actual result data or surveys from previous marketing campaigns. Thus, large marketing resources must be allocated and consumed based upon decisions reached without a meaningful assessment of the reliability of such decisions. Consequently, most marketing resources are wasted because they are directed to large population segments only a fraction of which would have a potential interest in the product or products being promoted. For example, most advertisements on web sites have a click-through rate of only 1.0%. It is also worth noting that this click through is what gets an advertiser to buy advertising space on that site again.
While marketing companies have managed to amass a large database of buyers, buyer behavior and advertising campaign results, the database is not used in marketing decision-making except as background. It is mainly used to blindly construct mailing lists for direct mail advertising rather than to support decision-making. The selection of advertisements or any other marketing campaign such as direct mail and promotions, running on a particular radio or television station, magazine or a web site are made without direct correlation to the users watching or accessing such sites, magazines or stations. Instead, potential advertisers look to the program content of the station or site or magazine and try to deduce from that whether persons interested in a particular product would view or subscribe to the particular site, magazine or television program. Thus, advertising on a web site, for example, is the same for all viewers of the site and is not otherwise adaptable. This lack of adaptability necessarily entails a waste of a large proportion of marketing or advertising resources.
Another factor as to why targeting is becoming an important requirement on the Internet is that customers of Internet sites such as advertisers are starting to pay for results and not just for simple exposure. So an advertiser might pay an additional charge if the user reacts to an advertisement. Reaction may include either clicking on a link (click-through) or buying a product (in which case the advertising site is paid a small share of the price).
For these and other reasons, there is a need for the present invention.